Moving Forward

On the importance of just doing things.

I’ve been in a very reflective mood lately.

This has been a turbulent year, professionally-speaking, with loads and loads of ups and downs and very high highs and some very low lows. It’s too early to review the year yet, but overall I do consider the last few months very successful - it’s easy to focus on those few low lows, but one shouldn’t let them cloud the many little wins along the ways and the great progress we have made and continue to be making.

I’ve been reflecting lately on what brings those wins, what really is the source of this ‘progress’?

Of course a lot of the times, it’s simple cause and effect. We’ll initiate something, work on it loads, it will go well and we’ll take a step forward because of that. It can go the other way around too, things fail, and oftentimes that’s also just a direct cause of work we’ve done or decisions we’ve made.

But sometimes - more often that I actually realise - progress comes from an unexpected direction, it’s the correlation of something I’ve set in motion years ago and forgotten about, or it’s not even a correlation of anything, but rather it feels like it just ‘comes’.

I went to a talk recently with legendary producers Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner from Working Title (a company that has inarguably changed the landscape of independent cinema worldwide) and amongst the many important things they mentioned, one that really stuck with me was the importance of ‘simply moving forward’. How did you get to where you are, they were asked, how did you get through those first few turbulent years, and it seemed they didn’t really have a specific answer, there was no one big decision or one massive win, it was simply ‘moving forward’.

The little decisions along the ways and those little wins they lead to are often the cause of progress and respectively, success.

I’ve lately started noticing this myself - little decisions I’ve made along the way have their way of coming back to you (both in a positive and negative way). People I’ve met years ago have helped me now, projects I’ve completed years ago seem important now, places I’ve been years ago seem to matter now. We can be exploring a path for financing a project for years or be pursuing a specific person we really want for that project for years, and none of that can works, and then in the end financing and people come on board very suddenly and from seemingly ‘random’ and unexpected places.

I think I’m starting to know - and I think I’ve known this for a while, but now I really understand it - in today’s industry, specifically creatively speaking, a ‘big break’ isn’t really a thing. It’s all just about moving forward - doing stuff all the time, going places, making friends, seeing art, learning new things every single day. Doing stuff because they just seem fun sometimes; not everything needs to be an exquisitely planned step forward because sometimes one step forward is two steps back, but also sometimes one step back is two steps forward. Doesn’t make much sense, but that’s the way it seems to work. Who really knows what the right thing is at the right time - I think the important thing is just always doing something (or always doing many things actually) and developing yourself personally, and your career, through that.

This is clear even if you look at things higher up the ladder - look at actors for example. Twenty or so years ago, there were a lot less actors, but more importantly, there were a lot less things shooting, so if you got a solid part in a big movie, you were ‘in’. Now, there’s so much shooting, and also indies and TV hold a much more ‘equal’ status in the industry, so booking a good job in something big doesn’t guarantee anything. Even booking a lead in something good doesn’t guarantee anything; if you look at the ‘young stars’ of today, all of them had to manage their careers very carefully for the last five or so years to get to a place where one would consider them comfortably and solidly ‘safe’ in the industry now.

Of course, having said all of this, strategy is still very important and one can’t be doing things just on a whim. I still strategise a lot - too much maybe.

But if you’re getting anything from this (or if I am - this newsletter feels oddly self-reflective), it’s to just keep doing stuff, exploring different things, learning, working tirelessly, and always moving forward. No one knows where your life or mine will go, but I think we can all agree forward is better than backward.